News: January, 2011

Happy New Year! We have been busy, busy, busy. Over the holidays, we caught the crafting bug. We designed and made a large number of promotional tote bags. If you are interested in "toting" around the Student Handouts message, please send us at email at studenthandouts@gmail.com with your name and mailing address, and we'll put a tote bag in the mail to you. Put "Tote Bag" as the subject of your email.

What's new this month? You may have noticed that several of the web pages have a new design. This "full page" design has received some rave reviews, so we intend to continue incorporating it into the site.

We have started a "Back to School Guide for Parents." It still needs a bit of polish, but feel free to take a look and share your thoughts.

Did you know that this web site is ranked in the top 300,000 of all American web sites? This may not seem impressive at first glance, but it's excellent for a small-time web site created from scratch by non-computer people less than three years ago! In the last year, we have gone from about 200 daily visitors to over 2,000 visitors per day. Keep spreading the word!

Adolf Hitler in the Reichstag, 1938

Adolf Hitler in the German Reichstag in 1938

See this and many other photographic images related to Nazi German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler and World War II. All of the photos, etc., come with informative text. Many of these texts are available as sound or video in order to help struggling readers. What a neat, fun way to learn World History! For teachers, this is a great way to introduce students to image DBQs. Students look at the image, read the educational text, and discuss what they see in the photos. This will prepare kids for state proficiency exams. After taking a look at these galleries, try assigning students our printable and/or interactive DBQs, available by searching or browsing our site under "World History."

News: December, 2010

Happy holidays! It is December, and the season of shopping is upon us. You'd be surprised by how much money we can spend while taking mini-breaks from working on this website!

So much has happened with this site in the last month. We have been updating individual pages, which has created a few glitches. If a page looks a bit wonky, have no fear...we are working on the problem.

We are also working to improve and increase our interactive vocabulary games. It's a lot of work, but we as well as you want to have online vocabulary games for each of our college-prep vocabulary lists. This task is underway, and we will hopefully make a lot more progress by the new year.

As you know, the educational image galleries continue to grow. Keep your fingers crossed that we maintain our momentum!

We have likewise changed the layout of a few pages, particularly the citations and graphic organizers. Some of you have reported back that the pages load more quickly, which is terrific. We were hoping for this. We were also trying to mix things up a bit by making the individual web pages more varied. The "same" is good for the most part, in terms of users always being able to find the information they need on a page, but a little diversity helps to keep the eyes from tiring.

The Rise of Parliamentary Democracy in England

We have an interesting interactive image gallery on the rise of parliamentary democracy in England. Our unique images are captioned with facts that explain the people and events in this unique period in European history. Who was Oliver Cromwell, and what effects did he have on England and Ireland? Who was Charles I or Charles II? What were the Puritan Revolution and Glorious Revolution? This is a great introduction or review for teachers and students.

Death and Destruction in World War II

We have nearly completed our World War II image galleries. The latest gallery focuses on Death and Destruction in the Second World War. Several of the images are quite graphic, so please use with caution when showing the gallery to students. This particular photograph, taken in 1944 by the Germans and confiscated after the Allied victory, features American casualties at a crossroads in Belgium.

Existential Depression in Gifted Students

If you come in contact with gifted students, here is a neat article for you on existential depression among gifted students. The basic premise is that familiarity with the "big questions" of life can leave gifted students feeling depressed, because these students are emotionally unequipped to deal with the inevitability of death, etc. (We know...who is?) Luckily, strategies are offered to help students to overcome this sort of existential crisis and continue their ascent into higher planes of human knowledge.

Convert PDF Files to Word Documents

Look what we found online! This is a PDF-to-Word Converter. Take PDF documents (the type you open using Adobe Acrobat Reader) and open them in Microsoft Word. Why? You can extract the text you need easily, change the text around, and more.